Canadian pop crooner Gino Vannelli’s big era was from the mid-70s to the turn of the 1980s. However, like Yes — and this might be the only similarity to Yes — he put out an album in the middle of the ’80s that was not a return to form, but instead a sort of rebirth

It’s not always easy to find an unfiltered moment like this from Hall and Oates — a pairing that has become so closely associated with genre-jumping mixtures of street-corner soul with modern new-wave verve.

Long before Danny Hutton gained universal fame with Three Dog Night, who racked up 21 great Top 40 hit singles between the years 1969 and 1975, he was busy getting his feet wet in a variety of capacities.

An eight minute song with alien (for the time) sounds wasn’t a recipe for a major hit, but just reaching 33 on the Hot 100 in 1972 qualifies as a notable achievement for “Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You).”

In my youngest music-listening years, Lou Reed’s junkie hipster milieu couldn’t have been further from mine, and his poetry was just as otherworldly. It wasn’t just that I’d never lived it. I could scarcely imagine it.